


the most important thing

by orphan_account



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Break Up, Comment Fic, F/M, Female Protagonist, Future Fic, Independence, Monsters, POV Female Character, Podfic Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-05
Updated: 2012-08-05
Packaged: 2017-11-11 11:57:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/478307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At some point, all this aloneness and independence will be enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the most important thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ignocts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignocts/gifts).



> Originally posted at portions_forfox's teen wolf comment ficathon [here](http://portions-forfox.livejournal.com/23165.html)

Allison finds a place, the perfect place, on the corner of Pine and 8th street, two blocks from a grocery store and four blocks from a Starbucks. There's a cute deli on the same street too, and the landlord is this nice old woman who tells Allison to call her Frances, and there's a balcony and utilities are included and she gets great light in the living room in the afternoons.

She can't call anyone to help her move so she does it all herself, renting a U-Haul and packing everything up one morning when Scott is gone, called in for some emergency at the vet hospital. She feels like a coward but that's nothing new, and she turns up her music loud as she drives to the new place, singing along and smiling at the other cars at stop lights because this is going to work, it has to work, there are no other options. 

(Thirty miles and a new grocery store isn't much of a move but it still counts, it has to count.)

She signs up for art classes at the YWCA and paints disastrous canvases in the great light in her great new living room, just big paintings of lopsided flowers and misshapen landscapes. She jogs in concentric circles in her neighborhood, repeating lines around the same five blocks and waving at the children who are ever present in all the cookie cutter front yards, playing tag and laughing and throwing basketballs at the sides of their houses. She makes friends with the girl who lives in the apartment above her and they go see the new superhero movie at the Duplex and drink margaritas on Allison's balcony on Friday nights, talking about celebrities and clothes and other very boring things. She donates fifty dollars to the building fund to help fix up the sidewalk outside the front door and starts a Roth IRA and joins the ASPCA on night on a whim and buys a new cell phone, one of the new fancy ones that costs her a quarter of her paycheck each month.

(She doesn't call her family. She doesn't call Scott. She ignores their calls, and Lydia and Stiles's too, and avoids the places where she knows they'll be, and even when Stiles texts her one night that Isaac and Derek were hurt during the full moon night, she still doesn't send them anything, even though she wants to.)

Two months in she's attacked by something that looks like a cross between the wendigo that she and Scott fought two years ago and her great aunt Lucille on one of her bad days, and she kills it by herself with her bow and the wicked knife that Derek gave her for her twenty-second birthday. She looks up what it is and doesn't call Stiles, and buries it in the woods under three oak trees and doesn't call Derek, and goes home and drinks an entire pot of tea before she stops shaking and doesn't, doesn't, doesn't call Scott. 

A week after that she runs into what must be the omega that Derek had mentioned scenting a couple months back, and Allison hits it with her car before it can even think about coming after her. She guns it all the way home and circles the town twice, hitting every bridge there is just in case, and starts keeping an extra bow in her car and on her balcony. Three weeks after that she spots pixies in the rafters of the history museum and calls an old friend of her dad's for a banishment spell. A month after _that_ she finds a ghost in an old house that's been converted into a coffee shop, and then a radical hunter in town who thinks she's a wolf, and then a high school kid experimenting with hex bags, and then, and then, and then. 

She sees Scott every once in a while, because it's a small town and he has dinner with his mom at a restaurant near Allison's place. He looks - he seems - 

Anyway.

There's one night when Allison is in the woods, trying to hunt down an herb that will supposedly kill something called a _seed eater,_ or _ragface,_ depending on which blog you believe, but what the hell ever because it's been _eating children,_ and she runs into Derek - or really, he runs into her, because she's not stupid enough to believe that this is actually a coincidence. 

"You'll find what you need by the creek, a mile south of here," he says first, smirking like he always does when he manages to scare the crap out of somebody by showing up out of nowhere. 

"Thanks?" she says.

"Boyd and I tracked it to the northeast part of town," he says helpfully, "we can't get close to it, it has a natural defense against other supernatural creatures."

Allison bites her lip and crosses her arms across her chest, shivering; she's been trying to find this herb for three nights in a row now, and she's starting to get a cold. Her throat is sore, her lips are chapped, her nose is running. She feels like shit.

"Are you asking me to kill it?" she asks.

Derek raises one bushy eyebrow. "Weren't you going to, anyway?"

Well, true, but Allison feels rather put out regardless.

"So, are you done yet?" he asks, not giving her much of a chance for a passive-aggressive reply. 

"Done?"

He just stares at her, somehow managing to convey judgment and disapproval without saying a single word, and Allison feels suddenly, intensely angry, angry enough to storm off and find the stupid herb and kill the stupid kid-eating monster and then fume and mutter to herself all the way home because, what the hell.

Anger is good, it's healthy, or something, and it carries her through the next few months, the moments when she gets so low she considers calling Scott even though he gave up trying to contact her weeks ago (and _what does that mean oh my god did he meet somebody did he give up on me what is he doing is he okay is he hurt stiles would call me if he's hurt oh my god i miss him_ ) and when she catches glimpses of the pack around town and ducks behind shelves and fire hydrants to avoid them even though they can smell her from miles away and she always ends up feeling stupid and naive and young, in all the ways that she never felt like that when she really was all of those things.

Because here's the thing: Allison didn't leave because she stopped loving Scott, or any of them, she doesn't even think that that's possible. She left because she woke up one morning and realized that everything in her life was also Scott's, that her friends were Scott's friends, that even her job was related to Scott because he was the one who suggested she look into the opening at the dojo in the first place and the one who encouraged her to get her teaching license and just - how much is too much, she thought, how long can you exist so wrapped up in another person that you can't tell what's yours or his anymore and not go _insane_? It's like what Kate used to talk to her about, all those years ago before Allison knew everything or anything at all - how she'd warn Allison to never get too wrapped up in somebody else, to _always keep your sense of self, kid, whatever you do, because that's what's most important._

Allison realizes the dubious merits of taking advice from her long-dead serial killing aunt but she's been running on fumes as far as reliable family members go and whatever, it's not like she could talk to Lydia or Erica or Stiles about any of this, not with how tied up with Scott they all are, how even when they don't get along they all still back each other up without question, no matter what. And it's not that Allison doesn't understand that and respect that and even want that for herself - but she never knew how terrifying it was to look around at her life and see that everything she has is all wrapped up together in one big package, to see the loose ends and the strings she could pull to make it all unravel. How could she not want to get some space, she asks nobody, all alone in her great new apartment with its great light and great balcony. How could she _not_ want to find something that's only hers, and no one else's?

(In some section of her heart, a section that she hasn't yet acknowledged, Allison knows that she will go back. At some point, all this aloneness and independence will be enough, she will kill enough evil things and paint enough disastrous paintings that she will be satisfied and she will go home. And they will be angry with her, all of them, for abandoning them and not calling and rejecting them, Scott most of all, and it will be difficult and she will work harder than she's ever worked for anything in her life, but she will get them back, and most importantly, she will know that she's doing it because she wants them and she loves them, not because she cannot live without them, and Allison knows, more than anybody, that the distinction is what will make it work, in the long run.

And anyway, it has to work. There are no other options.)

**Author's Note:**

> original prompt: _i've been afraid of changing 'cause i've built my life around you._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] The Most Important Thing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/487872) by [knight_tracer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/knight_tracer/pseuds/knight_tracer)




End file.
